TORONTO — It was the kind of gritty, keeping-the-team-in-the-game performance the Yankees have come to expect from Andy Pettitte over the years, but there’s nothing even the best pitchers can do when their lineup can’t score.

Pettitte pitched well enough to win Tuesday night, but just one self-professed “terrible mistake” from the southpaw proved to be the difference in a 2-0 loss to the Blue Jays.

“If we pitch we’ve got to score some runs, and if we score some runs, we’ve got to pitch,” Pettitte said. “It seems we haven’t been mixing those together. “We’re playing terribly and it’s a bad time to be doing that.”

While the Yankees have lost four in a row and are desperately trying to stay in the AL wild-card race, Pettitte has been doing his best to end his team’s struggles. Over his last eight outings, Pettitte has posted a 2.02 ERA (11 earned runs over 49 innings), but he has a 3-1 record to show for it and the Yankees have won five of those games.

Tuesday was another quality start for Pettitte, as he limited the Blue Jays to one run on six hits and two walks over 6 ²/₃ innings, striking out five along the way.

That lone run, a Colby Rasmus solo home run in the fourth, was a surprising one given the source. While the left-handed hitting Rasmus has been a strong power bat for the Jays, he has just a .258 average against left-handed pitching this year and was just 0-for-6 with a walk in his career against Pettitte. The Yankees left-hander, moreover, had held lefty hitters to just a .203 batting average this season.
But a favorable matchup means nothing if the pitch isn’t located properly. On a 2-2 count, Pettitte threw an 81-mph slider that simply didn’t slide, allowing Rasmus to blast the pitch into the Rogers Centre’s second deck.

“He got deep in there in that at-bat, it was just an idiot [pitch], trying to bounce a cutter on top of the plate to see if I could get him to swing,” Pettitte said. “It was just stupid, a bad thought process and it was just a bad idea.”

Pettitte threw 110 pitches in the game, his longest outing since he threw 115 pitches on May 18, 2012. With one out in the seventh, manager Joe Girardi made a brief mound visit and then returned to the dugout. Pettitte then induced a Jose Reyes fly out before finally being relieved by Shawn Kelley.

Girardi said he decided to pull Pettitte in the seventh because Josh Thole, a left-handed batter, led off the frame.

“You can’t ask any more out of him,” Girardi said. “He was on fumes out there in the seventh inning and he gets two big outs in that inning for us. You can’t ask for anything more.”

While Pettitte admitted he was tiring, he also wanted to keep contributing.

“I was saying ‘let me finish the inning off’ and I was hoping [Girardi] wouldn’t come back out there,” Pettitte said. “But I understand, [Rajai Davis] was hitting me well. Obviously I would’ve loved to have stayed in.”

To put a cap on the Yankees’ bad luck on the night, Kelley promptly allowed a solo homer to Davis, the next batter in the inning. That extended the Jays’ lead to 2-0 and, with the lineup struggling against knuckleballer R.A. Dickey, the two runs was more than enough.